Somethin 'Bout Kreay

Columbia; 2012

Find it at:

Natassia Zolot, the 22-year-old Oakland rapper known as Kreayshawn, rose to popularity in exceedingly modern fashion, but we've known how to describe her career since before she was born. She's a quintessential one-hit wonder for the digital age-- a girl who accidentally recorded a near-perfect pop-rap hit and followed it with a hollow thud of a record. If her breakout YouTube single, "Gucci Gucci", tore a hole in the conventions of pop and hip-hop, Somethin' Bout Kreay is the awkward seam that sticks out once someone has tried to sew it back up with some expensive twine.

Somethin' Bout Kreay would elicit the embarrassment of, say, walking in on a younger sibling dancing awkwardly in front of her bedroom mirror, were its shrill clatter not so forcefully distracting. These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better. Excepting "Gucci Gucci"-- which shoots out of the mess like a geyser of glitter-- each track can be appreciated primarily for the relief it offers from the previous clunker. To put things into perspective, Lil Debbie, Kreayshawn's mannequin twin of a sidekick, is currently making music miles catchier than Somethin' Bout Kreay, while Gucci Mane and Kreayshawn associate V-Nasty's BAYTL, lyrically speaking, might as well be Watch the Throne in comparison. Imagine watching the "Gucci Gucci" video for the first time and knowing that in the near future-- just about a year later-- you'd be nostalgic for how traditional, how authentic, it felt. Time can move in strange, unsettling ways.

While she's always been discussed in a hip-hop context, Kreayshawn doesn't so much rap here as half-sing or speak. She sounds as though she's been called on in class to read aloud, sometimes short of breath, often painfully off-key and off-beat ("beat" here usually meaning a fizzy, atonal thump). The closest she comes to rapping is on the female-revenge anthem "Left Ey3", where her presence is almost offensively performative. "I should key your car/ But I'd rather slap your mom/ Only a bitch could give birth to such a fuckin' dog," she shouts. Later in the song, during a rare moment of 2 Chainz-like hilarity, she raps: "I'm Lorena Bobbitt chillin' in your bed/ I'm Britney Spears off hella drugs/ And I just shaved my head."

Elsewhere she's a deer in the headlights, lost and meandering through half-assed boasts about how much gold she's got, dismissing her haters and forcing out unmemorable lines that make zero sense. "Them white girls keep on mobbin'/ Yeah we do, your chance is over/ But not to be my lover/ All them haters ask me what I'm doing/ I just simply tell them, 'Kreaysonic,'" she says on "K234YSONIXZ", a song that is unlistenable in spite of a beat reminiscent of Salt-n-Pepa's classic "Push It" and a hook pulled from J. J. Fad's "Supersonic". At some point, on tepid New Orleans bounce homage "Twerkin'", we even run into Diplo, a fish out of water, trying to rap: "And we slow it down/ Slappin' on the bass/ Baby drop your booty down/ Til your booty's lower case," he mutters.

It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story. If anything, "Gucci Gucci" helped usher in an era of artists for whom "talent" is beside the point, artists who've triumphantly remapped a hierarchy of values so that charm, branding savvy, and novelty rule supreme. Kreayshawn is one of the first of these artists forced to reconcile her own wiles with tradition in the form of a full-length album on a major label. And the final product finds her allure and charisma entirely lost in translation.

Which is a shame, because in spite of all the dismayed chatter that has enveloped her since she arrived, Kreayshawn's charisma is a special force. Take, for instance, this joyful montage of home videos shot during her childhood and uploaded this summer, where she's pictured belting the lyrics to Nas' "Oochie Wally" alongside one of her girlfriends, pointing the camera toward a mirror, showing off her pets and her Playstation. It should feel familiar, hypnotizing even, to anyone (girls in particular) for whom youth included a lot of boredom, Top 40 radio, bulky camcorders, and a dial-up internet connection. A decade later, her antennae are still tuned to the same channels, her sensibilities still perfectly translating the whimsical stoned-kid-in-a-candy-store experiences of sitting on the internet, choosing outfits with your friends, and blasting the music that makes you happiest. That's the joy we couldn't take our eyes away from when we first learned who Kreayshawn was, and a joy that is entirely absent on her album.She may never get an opportunity to relocate it-- Somethin' Bout Kreay could very well be her first and last.